Coherent Shear Phonon Generation and Detection with Ultrashort Optical Pulses

Abstract

Using an optical technique we generate and detect picosecond shear and quasishear coherent acoustic phonon pulses in the time domain. Thermoelastic and piezoelectric generation are directly achieved by breaking the sample lateral symmetry using crystalline anisotropy. We demonstrate efficient detection in isotropic and anisotropic media with various optical incidence geometries. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.095501 PACS numbers: 63.20.Dj, 43.35.+d, 78.20.Hp, 78.47.+p By shaking atoms one may assess interatomic bond strengths and the integrity of crystal lattices. In particular this may be achieved by high-frequency phonon excitation and detection, providing a wealth of information on the elastic properties of solids on nanometer and atomic length scales owing to the enhancement in scattering when the phonon wavelength is of the same order as the structure under investigation. This field of research, initially driven by terahertz phonon measurements involving superconducting tunnel junctions, heat pulses, phonon-induced fluorescence, and Raman or Brillouin scattering [1,2], has more recently been supplemented with ultrafast optical techniques in the time domain. In particular, such impulsive optical generation and delayedtime optical probe detection at surfaces permits the use of propagating GHz-THz phonon pulses to acoustically inspect the interior of nanostructures [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Acoustic phonon generation with ultrashort optical pulses is enabled by a variety of mechanisms, such as themoelasticity [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], deformation potential coupling [10,11], or screening of electric fields combined with piezoelectricity [12,13]. The respective excitation of thermal phonons, carriers, or (rapid changes in) screening potential in an opaque material produce an initial stressed near-surface region whose size in the lateral direction ( * 1 m) depends on the optical spot diameter and in the depth direction ( & 100 nm) on optical absorption, carrier diffusion or builtin electric field localization. Phonon detection is achieved through the photoelastic effect or surface displacement when the phonon pulse returns to the same point on the surface after scattering within a short distance. In this case, with isotropic media or symmetrically cut crystals, the constraints of symmetry imply that one only excites longitudinal acoustic phonons in the depth direction.Such longitudinal acoustic phonon experiments have lead to picosecond time-scale studies involving as diverse a range of subjects as ultrashort time-scale carrier diffusion in metals and semiconductors [5,9,10], highfrequency ultrasonic attenuation in crystals and glasses [14,15], phonon generation and detection in semiconductor quantum wells and superlattices [6,12,16], and soliton propagation and their coupling to two-level systems in ruby [7,17]. In spite of these successes, these experiments only address one of the three acoustic polarizations. To match the impressive capabilities of Brillouin and Raman scattering techniques one would naturally w...

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